The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(6)
Flurries of wind blew spitefully through the ill-fitting windows, and when Michael went past what seemed to be a chimney wall he could hear the gale moaning inside it. Luisa was right, it did sound like whispering voices. Perhaps that was all he had heard earlier in the garden.
The walls of the main landing were partly panelled, and a series of framed photographs and prints hung on them. Some of these looked as if they were of Fosse House, and Michael paused to study them more closely.
The shots were nearly all rather smudgy groups, the faces indeterminate, and without names or dates they were not very informative. The sketches were fairly bland landscapes, probably local scenes, but one sketch was not a landscape, and it drew his attention at once. It hung at the far end of the landing, partly in shadow, and it was not very big, perhaps twelve inches by sixteen. But even from its shadowy corner, it was vivid and imbued with life. It showed a spartan-looking dormitory with wooden-framed bunk beds and deal tables. Young men, wearing some sort of uniform, sprawled on the beds or lounged over the tables, some apparently playing cards or even what could be chess with home-made pieces.
Michael found the sketch disturbing. At first he thought it was because the room was obviously a prison, with the men having the air of animals herded together. But as he went on looking, he began to realize his sense of unease was not engendered solely by the bars at the narrow windows or the glimpses of an enclosed yard beyond them. It was because the young men were being watched – and apparently without their knowledge. Three or four other men were standing outside the narrow windows, peering furtively in. Even depicted in pencil, their faces were unmistakably sly and gloating. They wore uniforms with an insignia lightly drawn on the arms and shoulders, and spiked helmets. Michael knew next to nothing about military history or uniforms, but he thought it was a safe guess that these were the distinctive headgear of the Imperial Prussian Army. Then was this a German prisoner-of-war camp? If so, it was a curious thing to find in an English country house. Or did it tie up with that letter dated 1917?
He stepped closer to the sketch, trying to make out more details, and it was then that he saw the figure seated on the edge of one of the card schools. The young man was dressed carelessly and casually like the others, but the artist had taken more trouble with the details. The deep-set eyes under the slightly untidy hair were distinctive, and on one cheekbone was sketched a small mark – a mark that might have been a leaf that had blown there and become stuck.
It was an exact replica of the young man Michael had seen earlier. The young man who had feared for his sanity and had begged not to be caught. But it could not possibly be the same person. In any case he had only seen the boy for a few moments and he might not be remembering him clearly. But he knew he was, and with the intention of finding something to dispel his wild imaginings he took the sketch down and carried it to a nearby wall light to examine it more closely. In one corner was a squiggle of unreadable initials – presumably the artist’s – and beneath it the words ‘Holzminden, November 1917’. Michael thought Holzminden was a place rather than a name, and he foraged for the notebook without which he seldom moved to note the details. It could all be checked later. The sketch itself might even be something Nell would find interesting and want to investigate, although pictures were not really her province.
The sketch did not seem to yield any more clues, and Michael replaced it. The likeness would be due to nothing more than a strong family resemblance, and it had nothing to do with his research into the Palestrina Choir, and the music and poetry of the Great War.
He walked slowly along the landing, studying the rest of the display. The photographs included several sepia faces in romanticized surrounds, but there were later ones as well, mostly from the 1940s. It looked as if Fosse House had been used as a small hospital of some kind in WWII; there were photos of the house with nurses and young men in wheelchairs on the lawns. Near the end, half in shadow, was a shot of a long room which Michael thought was at the house’s front. It seemed almost to echo the Holzminden sketch; again there were young men in uniform, some clearly badly wounded, others happily waving crutches or plastered arms at whoever had been behind the camera. As in the sketch, some were playing cards. Others were reading newspapers and looked as if they had put their papers down to pose for the photograph. A typed label proclaimed it as having been taken in Fosse House in November 1943.
There were no prying faces in this, but standing in the doorway watching the others was a man who conveyed the air of being apart from the rest. He was not quite in the light and there was a blurred look, as if he might have moved at the moment the shutter was pressed. Michael felt a tremor of unease. It could not be, of course, and yet—
He held the photo closer to the light, and the unease deepened, because he seemed to be looking at the man from the Holzminden sketch. Or was he? Yes, there again were the deep-set eyes, the distinctive cheekbones, and the blown-leaf birthmark or scar. It was undoubtedly the same man. Except that it could not be. He could not be in the sketch and the photograph, not twenty-five years apart and looking exactly the same. Nor could he have been in the dark gardens of this house earlier tonight.
Whatever the explanation, it was an odd thing to come across. Michael could not escape a curious feeling that this young man, whoever he was, had somehow been picked up out of 1917 and dropped into a slot in 1943. And then dropped into the gardens today, as well? It was patently absurd. He studied the blurred edges of the boy’s figure in the later one. Could some kind of double exposure be the explanation? Had someone tried to photograph the 1917 sketch and superimpose it on the 1943 one – perhaps wanting to depict the links between the two wars or create a montage? But the boy was seated at a table in 1917 and standing in a doorway in 1943, and it did not look as if the photograph had been taken with anything more than a box Brownie. He went down the stairs, still trying to think of an explanation.